The 1.80 SDK has been in developers' hands for a few weeks, and we can now report on the latest progress of the Sony system utilities and their memory usage. On this front, the 1.80 release has been nothing but good news for developers (and indirectly, consumers). This release heralds both a slew of new features, and, as anticipated, improved memory consumption.

First, both the main memory and graphic memory footprints have been reduced, reaching a new low of 48MB and 24MB respectively. That's a 12MB reduction since the 1.60 release. The extra memory is sure to be welcome by developers.

Feature-wise, Sony has responded to requests developers have made (which we previously reported here), adding three new system utilities.* The first is a picture export utility, which allows developers to export any pictures (usually screen shots) to the player's photo profile. * The second new utility is a music utility, which will allow developers to give consumers the choice of streaming their own music in game.* Third, a new system allows developers to use a registered PSP system as an extra display.